Note from the
John Graham Defense Committee: The following is documentation and
observations from the four-day trial of Arlo Looking Cloud. Most of the
information has been provided by an independent journalist present at the
trial, documenting testimony and providing some insight in the precedings.
While the testimony has not been taken from the official transcripts (we
have not yet received them), we believe it to be an accurate accounting of
the trial.

Day 1

Jury Selection

After jury selection, Defense and
Prosecution gave opening statements, both of them essentially agreeing Arlo
Looking Cloud was there at the crime scene; and then the State called Roger
Amiotte and showed grisly photographs of the unidentifiable body, blackened
skin, maybe — hard to tell much. Hard to know if they are the authentic
photographs, for that matter.

Nathan Merritt was called, a
former BIA criminal investigator, who explained that the body's hands were
too far decomposed to get fingerprints so they had to be cut off and sent to
the Lab in Washington DC. He also said at the initial "examination" at the
IHS hospital in Pine Ridge, that no x-rays were taken of the body —despite
the fact that Johanna Brand and Kevin McKiernan in their 1978 book, 'The
Life and Death of Anna Mae Aquash," said dental x-rays were taken, as did
Ward Churchill in a 1986 "Z Magazine" article, going so far as to
expostulate such a dental x-ray would have found a bullet in the cranium,
saying, "I was told the machine was broken."